They are a team based approach to delivering agreed results in an interactive workshop environment that use rules, motivation and visual aids to engender group collaboration.

Facilitated workshops are planned, focussed, decision based, productive and proactively supported sessions that are dependent on synergy and Commitment. Furthermore, they are designed to extract results in a reduced timeframe, meet a set of measurable deliverables and offer them to a higher quality than other document based approaches.

For a successful facilitated workshop, you have a facilitated workshop owner who will clearly define the objectives they want to achieve from a successful workshop. The objectives are independently reviewed by the facilitator to ensure they are achievable. This way you know you are setting out on something that can be done and this is not a wasted venture.

The workshop owner will agree what output is needed and what the endpoint is. The facilitator will confirm and communicate these objectives and this end point clearly and establish a set of ground rules from the outset of a workshop to deliver these objectives by this end point.

The workshop owner and the facilitator will agree the required output. Output will be produced from the workshop and the workshop owner and the facilitator will agree what is produced and agree during the workshop when they feel the output has been achieved. They will confirm with the attendees that the output is complete and has been achieved too.

The workshop helps teambuilding. A project team may never have spent any time together and this may be their first opportunity to meet their colleagues and to share ideas, concerns and thoughts about the project. Workshops are also a great opportunity to improve the requirements capture process. When you have all the stakeholders present, you have all the possible requirements available to capture.

Workshops provide great improvements in productivity. Rather than having eight or nine or more separate meetings with key individuals, you have all the key stakeholders together and hammer out a solution. The time it takes to achieve the solution is also significantly reduced and the elapsed time is shortened. Workshops are a great opportunity to make sure that all the important issues are raised and that all the important issues are dealt with.

One of the real benefits of a workshop, where all the various disciplines and key individuals are in attendance, is the removal of ambiguity. When an attendee makes a statement in the workshop it is heard by all the attendees. They hear it, understand it and comment on it based upon their understanding. It becomes very swiftly apparent, if someone has got hold of the wrong end of the stick or is trying to divert debate away from the focus of or the answer to the question.

Workshops are great for project groups because they raise their confidence levels. You know the right answers will be given because you know all the influential and knowledgeable attendees are present and commenting on the issues raised. You will hear the deep debate about the matters of interest to the group. You will see this has been explored completely and the correct group decision is reached.

This point is very important too. In a workshop, we do not reach a compromise, we reach consensus.
We reach an agreement with all parties and all parties are aware this was a consensus conclusion.
The facilitator makes sure that that happens.

Whilst the enthusiasm of the entire team, for the project and for the consensus reached during the workshop, is improved what the workshop also
introduces is a sense of buy in by all the attendees.
It is they who have reached this consensus, together and that consensus has been reached based on a full understanding of the background and debate
that led to the decision. They all experienced the workshop session and they were all a part of it, too.